


It's Our Ship

by rollyjogerjones



Series: Big Blue House - CS future family [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Captain Swan - Freeform, Daddy!Killian, Fluff, Original Character(s), daddy killian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7443973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rollyjogerjones/pseuds/rollyjogerjones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Killian and Emma's teenage daughter begins to have fears about what responsibilities she may be assigned in the fast approaching future, her father is there to reassure her and prevent her nerves from spiralling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Our Ship

**Author's Note:**

> I've never really read many fics of CS’s kid if they were all ‘sea in their blood’, so I felt inspired and wanted to give this little bit a go :)
> 
> If you guys like it, I could write more chapters?
> 
> Also, a huge thank you to colormyheartred (cutieodonoghue on Tumblr) for reading, giving her opinions and helping with tweaking parts when I was still writing this, and another huge thank you to blowmiakisscolin on Tumblr for beta-reading it for me and giving equally helpful and motivating feedback. They’re both awesome and lovely and their fics are wonderful so check them out! <3
> 
> I hope you guys like this and please let me know your thoughts! :)

A light summer breeze drifts through the big blue house that sits on the corner of 10th Avenue, Storybrooke, Maine. The rays of sunshine hit the windows and sends streams of warmth across the floor and along the ceilings as the door swings open. Dark pointed shoes hit the pine wood floor and carry the figure wearing them across the living room, into the wide open kitchen.

The house is warmer than when they had first chosen it all those years ago. No longer is it the empty shell it had once been. No longer does it hold the sword in the stone, held in pride of place in their basement. No longer is there the small vial of squid ink, tucked away and concealed behind the painting. No longer is there a shed round back, stuffed full of dreamcatchers hanging from the ceiling, reminding them of darker times.

No longer is this big blue house the place where Emma Swan had laid, body taut atop the sofa, arms clutching her own body, cheeks streaked with tears and salt on her lips as she grieved what could have been with her love. Her _true_ love.

Now, the house is alive. Oh, so _alive._

There are laundry baskets at the bottom of the stairs, and plates and cutlery ready to be scrubbed and returned back to their rightful place. There are leather jackets and grey scarves draped over the chairs that sit beside the window and telescope, and shoes kicked off and left by the front door.

There are pictures drawn with crayons and bright yellow paper stuck to the fridge, the paper scuffed at the edges as a sign of age. There is a faded wall in the corner beside a bookcase, where those same crayons had decided to scrawl an image of ‘Mommy’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Henry’. There are bikes in the shed, and an old play house beside it.

Happiness emanates from the walls, floors, and cobweb-laced corners. Giggles and shrieks of joy echo from the past through to the present, unwavering as time moves on, invigorating the home into a new generation of life.

Killian Jones enters the kitchen, three grease-bottomed bags with ‘Granny’s’ labelled along the sides, clutched in his ringed hand. His hair is still dark, but now there are faint streaks of grey.

His hands are coarse and aged. His sea blue eyes are tired, but still contain the same glimmer. The glimmer of an old man who has come so far – battled his own demons and inner darkness, been dragged through hell itself and fought for his happy ending – and had won.

He stands, pushing weight from one foot to the other, bag rustling in his hand like a bell to alert an animal.

Here Emma turns from the sink, hands dripping with soapy and bubbly water, blonde hair like rays of the sun scraped back in a pony-tail, her glasses sliding off her nose, smiling widely at him.

“Lunch for my lovely wife.” He announces, stepping forwards with a grin sweeping his face.

She hums, wringing her hands in the towel before pushing her glasses back to sit securely on her face and atop the apples of her cheeks. She steps into him and grasps for the bag. She doesn’t take it away just yet.

“Fries?”

“Of course.”

His wife tilts her head, and he smirks.

He had always been successful in winding her up, teasing her about her lunch. Food has always been an important thing, he has long since learned from being married to Emma Swan for nineteen years.

“Onion rings, love. No need to worry,” he assures her.

Emma hums again and takes the bag and drops it to the table, then wriggles her way into his hold. Her body presses against his and her hand finds his chest, fingering the coarse hair she finds there.

Their lips meet. Killian’s hooked arm goes about her waist, with Emma’s moving from his chest to his hair. She pushes against the nape of his neck to deepen the kiss, their tongues dancing with one another.

It is a while before they pull apart, chests heaving, breathing raggedly against the other. Killian is the first to speak.

“Where is our daughter?” He breathes against her face.

“Where do you think?” She opens her eyes, eyebrows raised in an incredulous look, as though to ask if he really requires an answer.

He responds with a deep, low chuckle.

_Of course._

“The sea is in her blood.”

His statement leaves him grinning with a stab of pride.

“I wonder where she gets that from.” Emma teases, further fuelling the pride bubbling in his belly.

She makes a reach for two of the bags with her face still hovering in front of his. She pushes them into his chest, the smirk on her face wavering.

“Go talk to her. She needs you,” she tells him, and kisses him again.

He reciprocates the kiss, murmuring against his wife’s lips.

“How so?”

Emma slides back on her foot, taking a moment to consider, “There are times I think she takes too much from us. You know it calms her being down there.”

Killian swallows harshly.

~~

It is a fine afternoon, with the wind whistling against the sails of surrounding ships, and the sun reflecting in trickling flickers of light as it sweeps its rays over the deep blue sea encompassing the docks. The summer is in full bloom in Storybrooke.

Villains hadn’t swept the town in months, with Rumplestiltskin having _somehow_ started to resist his darkest impulses years ago, for Belle and Gideon's sake. From thereafter, the ratio of heroes to villains increased in their favour with passing time. And what a coincidence to see that Storybrooke slowly saw a decline in curses and magical threats too.

That gave the Swan-Jones family their time. It gave them the free hours, evolving to days, evolving to weeks, months, and years, of quiet moments that Emma and Killian were so starved of at the beginning of their relationship.

They’d finally had their time to move into that big blue house with the white picket fence, embrace those quiet moments, and have those lazy mornings, pancakes and hot cocoa before work and school, barbecues in summer and snowball fights in winter.

It also gave them time to move forward and hit those big milestones in life that Killian and Emma had only dreamed of having as children. Not long after Hyde was defeated, and the Evil Queen was contained back inside Regina, they were quietly married, and one year after that, their family grew, welcoming a tiny, red, squealing baby girl that was all light, all joy.

They had found their home, their family, their happy ending.

Recently, life has been good. Very, very good.

Though, he would be lying if he said that he didn’t enjoy the odd disruptive occurrence from time to time. Storybrooke wasn’t the most interesting of places without a little danger once in a while.

Killian walks the gangplank now and hops down onto the deck of his ship.

He spends a few moments trudging around, hook dragging ropes away from his face, and then he hears her.

“Fuck.”

A curse comes from above.

_“Language.”_

She curses like a sailor, he had always told Emma.

Killian dares to look up, and it is then that he sees his eighteen-year-old daughter, Aislin Jones, dangling her feet from where she keeps them wrapped around a rope, high up on the beams of the masts of the Jolly Roger.

“Aislin, what are you doing?” He queries with a roll of his head and a cock of his brow. 

The question is addressed in a calm enough manner, but is thoroughly laced with a veil of tiredness.

_He is too used to this._

He knows full well that his girls can take care of themselves - his daughter drilling this into his head from the very moment she began talking. This doesn’t stop the fear that bubbles up at the thought of her falling, however. It has happened enough times before.

“Dad… hey! Just unfurling the sails, won’t be long!” She yells down at him.

“Bloody hell… your mother would kill me if she knew I allowed this.” _The very gods know she can._

“Which is why we’re not gonna tell her, right?” She retorts, a smirk twinging at the creases of her lips.

His daughter never did have the eloquence he had harnessed through a life of the royal navy. Her way of speaking was definitely more reminiscent of her mother’s feisty attitude.

Aislin finishes what she is doing with the sails, then wraps both her hand and foot around a rope, holding herself securely in place. She uses her other hand to slowly winch herself back down to deck.

He steps back as soon as he sees her safely in front of him.

“One of these days, I would love to come aboard my own ship and not see my daughter putting herself in harm’s way.”

“You’ll be waiting a while, then,” she begins to walk past him, but whips back round. “and I thought it was our ship?”

He grins after her, with that pride from earlier simmering back up.

And she’s right. It has become their ship.

As soon as she was old enough, they had brought her down to the beach – her first taste of the sea and the origins of her father. They dipped her tiny feet into the water. Her toes had flexed and she’d kicked her little legs about in fascination.

She had loved the water from the beginning, going off at a run towards the shore on family beach days, just about scaring Killian and Emma to death each time she did so.

When she was slightly older, she’d toddled around the ship, chubby hands reaching for various ropes that lined it, and pushing at them in the expectance that they would make a squeak or respond with a noise similar to the various toys on her play mat back home.

Under the observation of Killian, she would give them a tug, and he would respond by naming her a little pirate and claiming that she was trying to sabotage his marvel of a vessel.

At the age of five, he’d taught her to tie the simplest knots and started to educate her on everything there was to know about sailing.

At seven, the directions he had carved out beside the helm for Baelfire were redrawn for her.

_“Turn it three notches left to port, now…” His hand and hook guided hers over the top._

_She would always, without fail, spin the wheel right._

_“No, your other left.” Voice pitching up, he tickled her sides, and she erupted into giggles, to which he always chuckled back._

Every playtime involved a plastic cutlass of her own, and each time she would have another go at overthrowing the fearsome and dangerous pirate, Captain Hook. Inevitably, she’d always won.

Bedtime stories were always about his adventures in Neverland and told of the demon Peter Pan.

Killian remembered fondly the way he would amp up his voice to create a wave of excitement for little Aislin. Her face would scrunch up with wide gasps as Emma stood observing from the doorway, arms crossed as she’d grinned at her little family.

Her favourite tale, though, had always been the story of the pirate and the princess, who fell in love atop a beanstalk. Eventually, she had learned to recite it along with her father.

Over time, throughout her life, and when she was ready, she grew to know everything about her father’s pirating days – the good and the bad. She knew of his past, knew how he had changed and respected him more for it. She respected how he had found his good heart along his path of redemption, and Aislin became much like her mother in the way she admired Killian more, knowing who he had become, the hero he had become – for them.

She grew to know the Jolly Roger like the back of her hand, often being found, like today, simply wandering around fixing things that were not quite perfect and escaping away down to the docks for solitude.

That was one of the many things she had in common with her parents.

And boy, Killian smiled, did she have a lot in common with her parents.

All she really took from her mother was her appetite and a couple of other loose traits and similar features.

She had the same pluckiness as Emma, often becoming a stubborn and quick-mouthed lass when challenging the pair of them, with razor-sharp wit never failing to remind Killian of Emma. She also inherited Emma’s pouty lip, pressed into a thin line, which would appear every time she became frustrated.

But despite her mother’s traits, she is still an exact carbon copy of Killian.

David often teases her about the similarities, but honestly, who could blame him? They are undeniable.

She has her father’s temper, that’s for sure, occasionally breaking into random bouts of rage and clenching her jaw.

She inherited the similar mannerisms of the itch behind her ear, and the clenching and releasing of her fists when kept up in a task.

Her eyes are a deeper blue than her father’s, framed with the same dark long lashes. Her hair is the exact brown of his own, only longer and curlier, like her uncle’s and mother’s, and is regularly pulled back with a hair tie.

The mischievous grin and troublesome mannerisms are near identical.

Collaboratively, Emma and Killian came together on a few traits for their daughter. Though she had the stubbornness of her mother and the temper of her father, Aislin Jones took her unyielding commitment and devotion to her loved ones from the pair of them – never backing away from danger and always and forever being there to assist her family, whether that be in handing out swords for the next battle the town encountered or offering to babysit the younger children of Storybrooke.

As the years passed on, Killian’s ability to read Emma when something was bothering her only became stronger, eventually extending to his own children at times of distress.

Today was one of those times.

“Your mother said I would find you down here.” He hops up the steps to follow after her.

“Here I am.” She comments lowly, eyes failing to meet his.

She dusts her hands one against the other to scrape the layer of grit and dirt that had built from maintaining their ship. He registers her avoidance and chooses fewer words to be his best choice at the moment.

Aislin’s response to being pressed to open up about how she feels tends to go one of two ways - either she expresses what is bothering her willingly, and it is resolved quickly, or she gets angry and storms off, leaving her parents trying to read her. Emma herself had become better at preventing the latter.

She drops down onto the wooden deck and Killian joins her, scooting himself next to her, placing the Granny’s bags in between them both. His arm pulls back with a dramatised swing at the elbow to present the food.

Aislin follows his movement, her eyes darting from the bag and then back up to his face. He smiles at her and nods as a prod to reach down and enjoy the favoured sandwich inside, to which she reciprocates the smile and delves her hands into the bag.

~~

Once both bags have been thoroughly ripped apart and Killian is watching as his daughter devours the last of the onion rings (Emma’s daughter indeed), he sets his own drink down.

“So… do you want to tell me what’s bothering you, Cygnet?”

Her head doesn’t turn, but her eyes move to stare at him. His brows nearly shoot off his head teasingly as his eyes go bright.

“When are you gonna quit calling me that?” The growing grin on her face is impossible to push back down.

“When you stop being your mother’s daughter,” he fires back, smiling, too.

Killian comfortably pulls a loose strand of the brown locks back with his hook and tucks it behind her pointed ear. His light-heartedness seems to have eased her.

The grin on her face turns sour, then. Aislin picks up her leftover drink and twiddles with the straw as a distraction.

She starts slowly, “Grandpa got talking the other day…”

Killian remains silent as she begins to explain, not wanting to disrupt her thoughts from spilling out. His head tilts down towards her slightly and a frown grows. It’s not like David to leave a mark with his granddaughter.

“He said that I would be the next saviour after mom - that it was gonna be my responsibility one day to protect the town.”

It isn’t anything far-fetched for her to believe. All of her life has been spent in Storybrooke, growing up around the community of fairy tale characters and past occupants of the Enchanted Forest.

Surrounded by crises, day in, day out, Aislin had long become used to Leroy’s howls of imminent doom and seeing Granny preparing her crossbow for the next battle.

It was never any surprise to her when Emma was dragged away from their family days together to ward off the next wave of villains. It was her job. Only she was fitting for the role.

“I mean, I’m pretty sure he was kidding, but…” She corrects quickly, trailing off and eventually shaking her head, lost as to how she could possibly explain.

She sucks her bottom lip inwards and chews on it with her teeth.

“You’re worried you’ll actually have to take her place,” he finishes for her.

She nods and releases the breath she didn’t realise she was holding.

_Preposterous._

Emma will always be the Saviour, and at the rate at which the town’s villain population is declining, there will be no more threats to worry about by the time Aislin is old enough to have to face such a possibility.

Still, that is not his issue.

His daughter is brilliant, amazing – just like his wife.

In the beginning, Emma constantly doubted her abilities, whether it be her potential with magic or being able to let down her walls in order to open herself up to love, a family and a home.

Both underestimate their abilities, and both are wrong to do so.

He takes absolute pleasure in holding an unwavering faith in his family close to his beating heart, and takes insult when they don’t see themselves in the same way he does.

A heavy silence sits between them for several moments, father and daughter staring out at the horizon, landscape still and calm where the water merges into the sky.

She proceeds on, “Yeah, Grandpa’s taught me how to fight with a sword, but what use is that against magic? And Regina loves to remind me how useless I am with my magic, anyway.” She adds groggily.

Killian’s jaw clenches.

His daughter has regularly expressed a dislike for Regina’s teaching techniques, consistently conveying frustration when the girl fails to transfigure various objects handed to her, or failing to present something that the Queen requires with a mere poof of her light magic.

He often questions whether Emma would have been a better teacher for her.

Gulls shriek their harsh calls from where they sit on the surrounding mooring bollards lining the docks, and the faint smell of the cannery sits heavily in the air around them, accompanying the almost-silence.

“Have I ever told you the tale of when your mother met your uncle?” He wonders suddenly.

Her fingers stop bending and twisting the straw in her grasp. “Liam?”

“Aye. It was during my time in the Underworld.”

He adjusts where he sits, boots clapping together as he swings his legs.

“I’m not sure he liked her an ounce,” They still stare out to sea, but his words manage to scrunch up her brows, “He felt she wasn’t good enough – that she didn’t want what was best for me. Of course, that was absurd.”

He thinks back to that time, where the pair were sneaking private quarrels in and away from their main goal of discovering the missing pages of the storybook - the pages they needed to discover Hades’ weakness.

“He eventually learnt how wrong he was, and one reason for that was due to your mother proving and knowing herself, that her intentions were, in fact, pure.”

Aislin seems to be considering his words. She has placed the cup down now and is staring at her palms in her lap.

“Look, what I’m trying to say is that you have to believe in your own strengths above anyone else, Aislin. Once you’ve realised yourself how capable and marvellous you are, then, and only then, can everyone else follow and believe in you, also.”

“Is that your way of saying you don’t believe in me yet?” Her lips twinge upwards into an almost-smile, her mood improving with his encouragement.

“You know we believe in you, Cygnet. Your mother and I, Henry, your uncle, your grandparents… we all do. We always will. But it’s crucial that you do, as well.”

“But my magic-”

“Is a lot of hard work, which you are putting back into it brilliantly,” he jumps in. 

“From what I’ve learned, it seems Regina didn’t start her lessons until she was about your age, and she found much difficulty in it, too. If anything, you are stronger now than what she was in her time.”

The skeptical frown on her face lifts.

“It has always been the same - we deal with any struggles you’re having with your magic as we come to them, and we always deal with them, don’t we?”

Their eyes finally catch each other’s again. A smile is spreading slowly but surely on her face.

“You’re a bloody strong lass, and your magic is only ever improving. Your mother and I see it all the time, and we couldn’t possibly be any prouder. You can do it, and I would not be surprised if you grew to be stronger than both Regina and your mother. Don’t ever compare yourself to your mother’s abilities. You’re both amazing, in your own ways.”

The smile finishes growing until she’s beaming back at him.

He nods to confirm that she has taken on this knowledge, and a grin lifts his lips then, too.

He moves the bags and their leftovers from between them and she shuffles towards him. Aislin turns into her father’s side and his arm curls around her.

“Thanks, dad,” she mumbles into his arm.

He nods again lightly, smiling as he pulls her close and rests his cheek atop her head. He presses a kiss into her hair whilst cradling the back of her head.

“I’ll have a word with Regina.” _No one else will put that bloody woman in her place._

“I’m pretty sure your idea of ‘a word’ is yelling while she throws fireballs,” Aislin laughs.

“But it always has the desired outcome, does it not?”

They’re both grinning, now.

“We should head home. Your mother is alone.”

Aislin silently agrees. She pulls away and uses momentum to pull herself to her feet, holding an outstretched arm for her father.

He takes it and gains his footing with a pained grunt.

“You’re getting on, old man.” She smirks.

“Watch it, you.”

“How old are you again? One million? Two million?”

Killian swings an arm around her, holding her too tight as punishment as they walk back down the deck and leave the ship. And as Killian and Aislin Jones enter the big blue house a little while later, and Emma jumps from her seat on the couch to embrace them both, Killian knows one thing: _All is well again._


End file.
